


Rainbow Glitter Cupcakes

by patchworkofstars



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff, Food, He's a Good Boy, Human AU, Lots of Food, M/M, There's also a dog, it's literally a baking fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-08-21 18:31:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16581818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patchworkofstars/pseuds/patchworkofstars
Summary: When Patton has to be away for their wedding anniversary, Roman decides to make (extremely extra) cupcakes to surprise him when he gets home.It’s just baking, right? What could possibly go wrong?





	Rainbow Glitter Cupcakes

**Author's Note:**

> This was my fic for the [sanderssidesbang on tumblr](https://sanderssidesbang.tumblr.com/).  
> If you enjoy it, I definitely recommend you check out [this wonderful art](https://breloomings.tumblr.com/post/179943840941/this-never-happened-for-patchworkofstars-of) done for it by [brelooming!](https://breloomings.tumblr.com/)

“Are you _sure_ you don’t mind me being out for the day?” asked Patton, his freckled forehead wrinkled in concern and his brown eyes sorrowful.

Roman smiled down at his husband of precisely a year. “Well of course I’m not _thrilled_ about it”, he told him, “But it’s not _your_ fault the conference was scheduled for today. And besides, I have all _sorts_ of ideas for how you can make it up to me tomorrow.”

Patton beamed at him, then giggled adorably as Roman swept him up into an extravagant embrace. “Now, I should be back around seven”, he reminded him. “I’ll text you if I’m going to be late.”

Roman gave an exaggerated pout. “You’d better _not_ be late”, he said, “I don’t think I could _bear_ to be apart from you even a _minute_ longer than I have to.”

Patton giggled again and kissed him on the nose, and the pout melted away into a lovestruck grin as the familiar butterflies filled his stomach. With a surge of love, Roman captured his lips for a more lingering display of affection.

All too soon, Patton’s arms loosened and he pulled away. “I have to get going”, he said sadly, “But I’ll be back as soon as I can, okay?”

Roman sighed heavily but gave him a melancholy smile. "I shall count the seconds", he assured him, and Patton gave him one last quick kiss before climbing into the car.

Roman waved as he drove away, and then, when he had rounded the corner and disappeared, he turned and went back into the house. He had big plans for the day and he could hardly wait to put them into action, but there were a few things he needed to take care of first.

*****

He walked their labradoodle, Percy, and then sat browsing online recipes as he ate the sandwiches Patton had left for his lunch. He might not have much (or any) cooking experience, but he had an image in mind of the perfect cupcakes and he was determined to make them to surprise Patton when he got home.

All he needed, he was sure, were a good recipe, imagination, and the right music to put him in a baking mood. Oh, and ingredients, but he was confident those would be in the kitchen somewhere. An enthusiastic baker like Patton would be sure to have everything needed.

With a recipe chosen and his playlist prepared, he headed to the kitchen. Percy settled down on the kitchen step, his head on one side and his ears pricked forward as he watched this unusual sight with curiosity. Roman switched on the music, cranked up the volume, and danced around the kitchen for a few minutes before remembering what he was supposed to be doing.

After a few seconds of fumbling, he managed to tie on Patton's favourite sky blue apron with the pawprint design and admired his reflection in the refrigerator's reflective steel doors. While it wasn’t a particularly dashing look, he still thought it went rather fetchingly with his favourite red shirt. He shook his head. No getting distracted! It was time to track down those ingredients.

Humming along to a catchy tune, he hunted through cupboards, checking the list on the recipe every few seconds as the pile on the counter slowly grew. Patton being Patton, things were stored haphazardly wherever they happened to fit. He always seemed to know where he’d put them, but Roman frowned in frustration as he pulled out pasta, raisins, stir-fry sauces, packets of tea and jars of hot chocolate powder. 

"Muffin tin… Cake cases…" he muttered to himself, "Where the heck are the cake cases? Behind the icing sugar. Patton, sugar, I love you, but I don't know how you find _anything_ in here.”

He pulled out the pack, opened it, and tipped the contents out onto the worktop. “Now, pink, green, or purple cases?” he murmured. “Four of each, obviously.”

He counted them out into the tin, then put the rest back into the packet and pushed it to one side. Humming again and idly swaying in time to the music, he began weighing out the ingredients.

It was all going remarkably well until he attempted a twirl with the eggs in his hands, caught one foot behind the other, and landed in an inelegant heap on the floor surrounded by broken eggshells and a slimy, gloopy mess. 

“ _Asparagus!_ ”, he yelled venomously at the world in general. Being married to Patton meant finding creative alternatives to expletives, but the force with which Roman uttered them always more than made up for the censorship.

He froze as his eyes fell on Percy, staring at him in bemusement. “This never happened”, he told the dog firmly, waggling a finger at him. “I am the epitome of grace and poise.”

With a sigh he stood up, checked his outfit, and, grimacing, wiped the egg from the apron with a damp cloth. Thankfully his shirt and jeans appeared to have escaped harm. Sighing again, this time with relief, he set about clearing up the mess.

With the floor cleaner than it had been to begin with, and four new eggs beaten with only minimal shell to fish out, he frowned at the pieces of the electric mixer in his hands.

“How does one go about getting the whisk-y bits to go into the hold-y bits and actually _stay_ there?”, he complained to Percy, who lay down with a sigh and closed his eyes as if resigning himself to his master’s imminent failure.

But Roman wasn’t about to give up. He was strong, right? He did weight training, darn it, he could beat cake mix without relying on an unfathomable gadget! Picking up the bowl of sugar and butter, he threw his full force into the wooden spoon.

Percy jumped back up, startled by Roman’s yelp as sugar flung itself everywhere.

“Oh _foxholes_ ”, the man spat, grabbing a handful of sugar from the bag and dumping it into the bowl to replace that now coating his apron and the floor. He poked cautiously at the ingredients with his spoon before picking up the bowl once more, this time beginning slowly, gingerly to squish them together. Only when all the loose sugar had been absorbed into the yellow mass of butter did he risk another attempt at beating it.

*****

Forty minutes after starting he was finally ready to add the eggs and flour. The flour went all over the counter when he tried to shake it onto the scales, but at least that didn’t affect the measurements. Carefully he tipped the weighed flour into the mixing bowl and poured on the beaten eggs, then blended them carefully into the other ingredients.

He squinted uncertainly at the result. It looked...okay? If he was honest, he wasn’t even sure how it was supposed to look. Still, everything seemed to have combined into a smooth batter. That was good, wasn’t it? He was going to assume it was.

It took him five minutes to prise the lid off the brand new bottle of vanilla extract. Not because it was too stiff, of course. He was a manly, muscular man, who did fifty push-ups a day! But it was a small bottle, with a tiny lid, so it was hard to grip properly with big hands…

Well, he managed it in the end. He poured a teaspoon full and sniffed it dubiously. It smelled disturbingly like cough mixture, but it was definitely the right bottle, and he'd only just unsealed it, so he reluctantly added it anyway and blended it into the batter. Now it was time to add some colour to this thing! 

Finding five small bowls took a bit of searching, but he’d been through so many cupboards at this point that he was learning his way around. Then it was just a matter of dividing the batter between them and mixing a squeeze of gel food colouring into each. The colours were vibrant, and the sight of the rainbow forming before him was enough to lift his spirits and start him humming again. 

Slowly, carefully, he divided the blue batter between the twelve cases a teaspoonful at a time. It accidentally smeared all up the side of one, but he managed to poke most of it down to the centre with a knife. Other than that? Well, the quantities varied somewhat from case to case, but at least he kept his hand steady. 

Then another problem emerged. He seemed functionally incapable of dividing the batter evenly, and found himself running out of each colour in turn before he’d added it to every case. Although he tried his best to eke them out, somehow he still always ended up needing to scoop some out of the first cases to add to the last ones, a torturous process as he tried desperately to avoid blending the layers.

Over and over he thanked his past self for settling for only five colours instead of six. Five was madness enough. His whole world seemed to have shrunk to the kitchen and the Infernal Cakes of Doom. It took him over an hour to layer from blue at the bases through to red at the tops, and the red, even thinly spread, filled each case almost to the brim.

Time had ceased to hold any meaning for him. The only thing that stopped him giving in and shovelling batter into cases at random, letting the colours mix as they may, was the thought of Patton’s face lighting up with a delighted smile when he saw the rainbows.

“The things I do for that man”, he murmured. But then it occurred to him: what about the things Patton did for him? He cooked an array of tasty delights for them both almost every day, and Roman had always assumed that meant it was easy. It seemed he’d underestimated his husband’s skill in the kitchen.

*****

“Cooking time: 15-20 minutes”, the recipe said. Then again, the same recipe had claimed the cakes would take 15 minutes to prepare, and they’d taken him- He glanced at the clock –almost three hours?!

He baked them for 25 minutes, watching closely through the oven door for the last five for fear of them burning. Still, when he took them out they were pleasingly brightly coloured little mountains. Several of them had overflowed a bit onto the sides of the tin, but any annoyance he might have felt at that evaporated when he noticed two had done it in such a way that they'd flowed together, as though linking hands across the space between. 

_Like Patton and me_ , he thought with a loving smile, _two rainbows who’ve joined together._

*****

By the time the cakes had cooled he was ready to collapse in front of a long movie and forget about them. But Roman was no quitter. He'd planned to decorate them and decorate them he would, even if it took his last ounce of energy!

He decided on a light blue buttercream frosting since it was Patton's favourite colour. Making it was simple enough with the instructions he had, and although it took him a while to get the balance of ingredients right, he was confident he had made enough. 

Piping it onto the cakes, however, was a lot trickier than he’d anticipated. It seemed oddly reluctant to stick, instead trailing with the bag and slipping from the surface whenever he tried to form a spiral.

His technique improved somewhat with practice, but even so there were pronounced gaps between the swirls. It looked messy and unprofessional, and Roman glared at the flaws with distaste, but at this point he was running too low on both time and energy to fix them even if he knew how. 

Then a bigger problem arose. The buttercream, which had seemed in the bowl to be more than enough, barely covered five cakes. Roman sighed wearily, running a hand through his hair and leaving blue streaks of frosting. All wasn't lost, he could fix this, he just needed more time...and a lot more icing sugar!

He added the bowl to the growing collection by the sink and grabbed a clean one from the cupboard, both mystified and relieved that Patton had so many. Dispensing with measurements since they’d let him down with the first batch, he added a large chunk of butter, a generous splash of milk, and enough icing sugar to liberally coat both. 

Hitting the button to start his playlist again, he began to squish the three together with the flat of a knife blade. He would make this icing red, he decided, to add variety to the cakes.

The decision made, he squirted more and more red colouring into the bowl, determined this icing, unlike the top layer of the cakes, would be crimson instead of pink. It combined with the milk and pieces of butter into vivid scarlet lumps and gloop worthy of a horror movie. Yuck. Well, there was only one thing for it. He picked up the icing sugar box and tipped a generous heap over the mess. It was time to start mixing again.

More and more sugar went into the bowl, Roman using the power of the music to boost his flagging energy and stir with enthusiasm. When the quantity of sugar began to turn the frosting pink, he added squeeze after squeeze of colouring until redness was restored. There were seven cakes left to decorate, and he was determined that this time he would make enough for all of them.

When the bowl was two thirds full of crimson frosting, he finally stopped. There was barely any sugar left in the box. This frosting had a softer consistency than the first batch, but as he began to pipe it, he found it went on far more smoothly than the blue. It stuck better to the cakes, and gaps were easily filled without ruining the overall look. He wished he’d known from the start that was how it should be.

He shook generous quantities of edible gold glitter over each crimson-frosted cake, and to the blue he added tiny sugar flowers. Then he stepped back for a critical look at his creations, and gazed at them with relief tinged with disappointment.

The icing was uneven, the blue still with very noticeable gaps. Although the gold glitter matched elegantly with the scarlet frosting, it was dense in some places and sparse in others. And at least a quarter of it had missed the cakes entirely and was scattered over the worktop. He sighed, long and wearily, mentally debating whether he had the energy left to scoop it up into something.

Percy made the decision for him. He let out a whine and sat up, his head cocked to one side hopefully. Guilt hit Roman like a sack of flour to the gut. _Of course, I should have fed him at least an hour ago, poor dog._

Clearing up could wait, their boy needed his dinner.

*****

Patton closed the door gently behind him and switched on the hall light, taking a moment to shut his eyes and breathe in the scent of home. The stresses of the conference and the long journey home melted away, seeming suddenly distant and unimportant, and a sense of peace filtered into his bones.

His face lit up at the patter of paws on the hall floor, and he squatted down to accept Percy's enthusiastic greeting, trying to push away a flicker of disappointment that Roman hadn’t appeared. He had expected his husband to meet him at the door, just as eager as the dog for his attention, but the only sign he was even at home was the soft glow of a lamp from the living room. First there’d been no reply to his text saying he was heading back, and now this?

“Roman?” he called worriedly, releasing Percy and standing up.

“Pattoooon~”, came a feeble answering wail. “Come here and let me hug you, dearest, I don’t think I can move from this spot.”

Patton held his breath as he made his way towards the source of the cry, concern prickling at his heart. He found his husband slumped in his favourite armchair with traces of flour and blue streaks of buttercream in his hair. Further streaks and splodges adorned the apron he still wore, including a number of red ones that stood out vividly against the pale blue background. He gazed up at Patton, blinking the tiredness from his eyes, love finally overcoming weariness enough to bring a smile to his face.

“I missed you”, he said, reaching up a hand to cup Patton’s cheek. Patton leaned down to plant a soft kiss on his lips, then perched on the arm of the chair and draped his arms around him.

“I missed you too, sweetie”, he said.

“How was the conference?”

Patton shrugged. “Dull but necessary. I met some lovely people, but none as lovely as you.”

He leaned down and kissed the top of his husband’s head, and Roman smiled. “Smooth”, he said, with a chuckle, “I’m glad I married you.”

“And I’m glad I married _you_ ”, Patton told him, beaming. “But what on earth happened while I was gone?”

“A living nightmare”, Roman told him with a theatrical sigh. “I was a fool to think myself a worthy contender on the battlefield of baking.” He pulled himself up in his seat. “I’m _hopeless_ ”, he proclaimed. “I implore you, stay by my side forever, my love, for without you I would surely starve.”

Patton opened his mouth, then closed it again and frowned. Without a word, he stood up, walked to the kitchen doorway, and switched on the light.

Eight small bowls and one large covered the area in and around the sink, with a variety of spoons and other cutlery tucked into the spaces between them. Flour was trailed across the corner by the scales, and one patch of floor was dusted with sugar.

The main work area seemed to be covered with packets and jars of ingredients, and Patton frowned as he moved over for a closer look.

His expression softened as he saw what lay at the centre of the chaos: a dozen cupcakes, flamboyantly decorated with red and blue frosting. As he moved his head, the light caught thousands of flakes of gold glitter scattered both on and around the cakes.

Patton wasn’t stupid, especially when it came to baking, and a closer look at the traces of coloured batter in the bowls told him that Roman had been as ambitious as ever. That explained most of the mess, if not why Roman was so tired.

Smiling indulgently, he switched off the light and returned to the living room. There was clearly a lot of washing up to do, and the kitchen would need to be thoroughly cleaned, but they could do that together later. In the meantime, he had several questions.

Roman was watching as he returned, chewing his lip nervously. He sighed with relief when he saw Patton’s smile.

Patton draped an arm around him. “You made rainbow cupcakes? I’m so proud of you! Those can’t have been easy for a beginner.”

Roman groaned. “They took me _three hours_ , Patton!” he wailed. “I don’t know how you do it!” He pulled his husband’s arm further around him and began stroking his hand. “I’m so lucky to have you.”

“And I’m lucky to have _you_ ”, said Patton, kissing his hair lightly. “But Roro, my sweet caramel slice, how on earth did making cupcakes take three hours?”

“I’m a kitchen _disaster_ ”, Roman moaned, waving an arm vaguely but expansively. “Everything I _did_ went wrong. It’s a miracle the cakes turned out edible-looking, and they’re still not at _all_ how I envisioned them!”

His husband leaned down and kissed him again on the forehead, then settled carefully on his lap and began gently stroking the flour from his hair. Roman leaned back once more, closing his eyes and surrendering to the soothing sensation.

“I love them just the way they are”, Patton told him, “But if you’re not happy with them, tell me all about how you wanted them to be. We can make them that way together next time.”

Roman brightened immediately. “An excellent idea, my most precious rainbow cupcake! With my visionary decorating ideas and your spectacular baking skills, we’re sure to be an unstoppable force of culinary creativity!”

Patton sighed in loving amusement, resting his head on his husband’s shoulder and nestling against him as Roman’s imagination took flight. Whatever stresses the baking had caused him seemed to be washed away by the exuberant flow of ideas, and Patton let his own memories of the conference melt away too.

Tomorrow they would celebrate their anniversary properly, and he had no doubt it would be a wonderful day. But in truth, all he could ever want was right here: the two of them curled up in each other’s arms, with Percy close by, fresh cupcakes in the kitchen, and a lifetime of love to share.


End file.
